I know that military police are trained to enforce justice in well-defined ways.

I was speaking of soldiers and U.S. Marines being sent in as land forces, trained killers held in reserve to do the job of killing, then being told to frisk first and recite Miranda because we are pretending to do war but we are doing justice. My point is that war -- all its learned lessons and its training for life-or-death struggles -- is a very different skill than police action although both use weapons to make their point. Both are prepared for violence.

The reason declaring war is such an anathema is because it unleashes the dogs of war -- the Jurassic thought patterns of trained killers who are perhaps decent men and women outside of that framework, but whose major purpose is to take territory and lives away from the defined enemy.

If that is what we have to use because we have been attacked in outrageous fashion, I am sorry, but so be it written, so be it done. If we can clean up international terrorism with police actions -- tracking them down and arresting them -- let's do it that way. Let's not unleash the dogs of war and then tell them to act like hall monitors.

I think 6,000 lives and 40 billion in damages in four hours is pretty close to war, myself -- especially coming from an organized group to weasely to saywhat it has done. We have been named as the enemy in a covert violent war. The naming meant nothing to us; but the acts of war and the loss of our friends and cousins means something.

The problem is that it is a half-hidden enemy who believes in covert destruction. Intelligence when done correctly uncovers the covert.

The courses of action we are facing must include three things:

1. Huge amounts of effective intelligence gathering and analysis, identifying facts and their connections about the enemy from human, computer, financial, social, manufacturing, economic and all other germane intell. sources.

2. Precisely planned and effective special ops taking out exact locations and people known to support and act as enemy in the war.

3. Major communications designed to win friends among the populations involved in any nation, to make our motives and actions clear, to create and maintain operational consensus amongst coalition governments and to take out Big Lie operations against us -- such as the one started last week by the president of Afghanistan that our warlike attention is about Islamism. That is a terrible belief to allow to circulate unbchecked and only really expert public relations work can kill it in its tracks.

4. Including under 3. anything we can do to support decent human beings and provide them with hope for the basic freedoms listed in the Bill of Rights. Economic aid, morale building communications, discussions of what freedom means, etc. etc.

A